60 GHz Wireless Radios

There was a good article in IEEE Communications Magazine about the design trade offs for 60 GHz radios [1].  The 60 GHz band is unlicensed world wide, so there is commercial interest in using this band.  The main advantage is that at such a high frequency, relatively large bandwidths are possible to allow high data rate communications.  The article discusses data rates in the range of 2 - 5 Gbps being possible in the first generation products.  The main disadvantage of this frequency band is that it is not suitable for long range distances because of oxygen attenuation in this frequency band [1].  The ranges that are discussed in the article as being feasible are on the order of 10 m line of site [1].

[1] Smulders, Peter, Haibing Yang, Iwan Akkermans. December 2007. "On the Design of Low-Cost 60-GHz Radios for Multigigabit-per-Second Transmission over Short Distances." IEEE Communications Magazine. Vol. 45 No. 12.